And then came abruptly awake.
Ben Pertin! The man who had called him, the man he had not seen for years—suddenly Babylon remembered why that was so. They had lost touch, true, but there was a stronger reason than that.
It had been just a few years after graduation, in an accident while spearfishing in Long Island Lake. Pertin was always a restless, ever-moving sort of person, always looking for a new experience.
He found one there, at the bottom of Long Island Lake. His oxygen regulator failed, and he drowned.
TWO
The stewardess woke him up in plenty of time for him to drink a cup of coffee, splash water on his face, and be ready to disembark, but the Kooks had other plans. They interfered. The main landing strips at Logan-over-the-Sea were blocked by a Kook demonstration. The plane had to circle nearly an hour, at a prodigious waste of hydrogen fuel, while the airport police struggled to get the religious procession off the runways. By the time the plane got to its dock, and Babylon had completed the customs formalities and reclaimed his bag, it was full morning, and he decided against going back to his apartment. It was time to find out what this was all about.
He had difficulty getting to a phone because the remnants of the Kook mob were still being rounded up in the main lounge. They were disagreeable-looking people. It was an article of faith with the Criers of Cuckoo to renounce everything of this world; they wore clothing till it fell off them, they ate barely enough to sustain life, they preached the imminent coming of Cuckoo the Savior and Destroyer at every hour of each day. All of this left them little time for any of the normal preoccupations of humanity—such as earning a living. Their fasting had the additional effect of making them terribly, scarecrow lean—very much like the only race of indigenous humans that had been found on the strange, extragalactic object itself.
That, and their other habits, had one more effect. They smelled bad. Babylon averted his face, and tried to avert his nose, as he called the university's code on the stereo- phone. "This is Jen Babylon," he told the message-taker.
"Please enter an appointment with Dean Kooseman for me in, let me see, half an hour."
The empty golden glow inside the stage stirred silently, and then a sweet mechanical voice said, "Thank you, Dr. Babylon. Your appointment is confirmed."
He tagged his suitcase for delivery directly to his apartment and hurried toward the Cambridge subtrain.
He stopped short, staring at a knot of the Kooks being herded toward the limits of the airport.
Because of Babylon's specialty, he had some familiarity with the languages, and thus with the appearance and lifestyles, of a dozen or more of the major races of the Galaxy. And because the application of his algorithms required contextual clues, he had spent a good deal of time studying the collective societies of the creatures from Bootes, and the methane worlds that swung around the core stars, and the plantlike beings who swam in the seas of a planet in the Orion gas cloud. Like everyone who lived in a major city, he sometimes caught a glimpse of, sometimes even met, some T'Worlie or Arcturan as they limped around the hostile Earth streets.
But—here? For among the ragged human Kooks there were three who were not human at all, two doughy, soft Sheliaks and a creature who looked like a purple sea anemone. That was hard to understand! As recently as the few weeks ago when he left for his field trip, the Kooks were scarce, unimportant, and, of course, always human. Barely human; they came from the cast-offs of society. But if they were now attracting the great old races of the Galaxy there had been some significant change . . «
Dean Margaret Kooseman, at whatever age she was past eighty, should have been retired decades ago to make room for younger people. But she was kept on, year to year, because of her immense prestige in the field. It did not matter to the academic decision-makers that most of that prestige was borrowed from the discoveries and innovations of her underlings, whose papers were always coauthored by M. Kooseman, Ph.D., D.H.L., Sc.D. She got the credit, because she was the boss. "Jen, dear!" she cried, getting up to brush her leathery lips across his cheek. "Isn't it exciting? Did those crustaceans bother you on Moorea?"
At eighty-plus, she was still a surprising woman. "What crustaceans?"
"Why, giant crabs of some sort. It was on the news this morning. They swarmed ashore out of the sea."
"I don't know anything about giant crabs, Margaret." He sat down on the edge of the very soft, very deep armchair she kept so that she could put her visitors at the disadvantage of being trapped in it. "I was laid over in Greater Los Angeles for almost ten hours, so it's been some time since I left Moorea, and that must have happened after I left. Anyway, that's not what I want to talk about."
"Of course not, Jen dear! You'll do the school great credit. When the call came in from Tachyon Transmission Base requesting your services I was simply thrilled."
Tachyon transmission! But he was not surprised; the summons, and the warning, had certainly come from off Earth, and there was no other real way to travel in space. All physical objects were bound by Einstein's immutable speed law; it was only when coded as tachyon bursts that one could travel a light-year in less than one year. "What I don't know," he said, "outside of why I'm supposed to do this in the first place, is where I am supposed to go."
"Why, Cuckoo, dear. I thought I told you. Didn't you get my message?"
"I got your message and you didn't tell me. For God's sake, Margaret, why am I supposed to go to Cuckoo?"
"Because you are the world's greatest expert in quantum-dynamic linguistics, of course."
"But why?"
"Oh, well, Jen," she said vaguely, "they didn't exactly state, but of course it doesn't matter. It's not just your own career that's at stake, or even the school's honor. It's quite a feather in the cap of the human race! There's not a lot of respect for humanity in most of the Galaxy, you know. To have those stuck-up creatures send for a human being to solve a problem that they can't handle is—well, it makes me proud! And there's no use asking me what the task is because I don't know, but of course it doesn't make any difference." She was looking faintly annoyed. "It will only take a minute of your time," she pointed out.
He scowled at her. "That's not true."
"Yes, it is, Jen dear. Oh, not for the you that goes to Cuckoo, no. That might take days, I don't know, perhaps even weeks. But the you that's here in this chair will be right back in it this afternoon. You just walk into a box, and then a minute later you walk out of it again, and that's all there is to it. The scanners read out the total data on every atom of your body, and then they transmit your blueprints over the faster-than-light tachyon beam to— wherever. Wherever in the Universe you want to go. In this case, Cuckoo. And when the blueprints get there, they're read and used to form high-energy plasma into an instant, exact, living duplicate of yourself. He is you in a sense, Jen, that's true. But the other you—the real you that's sitting in my chair right now—that you will be sitting there again when the other one's a zillion light-years away."
"But—Cuckoo! Why, that's clear out of the Galaxyt And besides, I've heard of foul-ups. Transmissions that got garbled. People coming out of the other end in the form of messes that you wouldn't believe."
"No, Jen, not anymore. The signals are self-regenerating now, and that just doesn't happen—well, not often, anyway. Unless they've decided to edit the transmitted person in some way, to make it possible for him to survive in the new environment—but why are we talking about this, Jen? It's all the other you, isn't it?"